Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco

By Douglas Henry Daniels

The black migration to San Francisco and the Bay Area differed from the mass movement of Southern rural blacks and their families into the eastern industrial cities. Those who traveled West, or arrived by ship, were often independent, sophisticated, single men. Many were associated with the transportation boom following the Gold Rush; others traveled as employees of wealthy individuals.

Douglas Daniels argues for the importance of going beyond the written record and urban statistics in examining the life of a minority community. He has studied photographs from family albums and interviewed members of old black San Francisco families in his effort to provide the first nuanced picture of the lives of black San Franciscans from the 1860s to the 1940s.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
The black migration to San Francisco and the Bay Area differed from the mass movement of Southern rural blacks and their families into the eastern industrial cities. Those who traveled West, or arrived by ship, were often independent, sophisticated, singl

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520351059

Douglas Henry Daniels

Douglas Henry Daniels is Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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PIONEER URBANITES

PIONEER URBANITES

A Social and Cultural

History of Black San Francisco

Douglas Henry Daniels

Foreword by Nathan Irvin Huggins

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1990 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Daniels, Douglas Henry.

Pioneer urbanites: a social and cultural history of Black San Francisco / Douglas Henry Daniels; foreword by Nathan Irvin Huggins.

p. cm.

Reprint. Originally published: Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 1980.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-520-07399-1 (paperback)

1. Afro-Americans—California—San Francisco—History. 2. San Francisco (Calif.)—History. I. Title.

F869.S39N4 1991

979.4’6100496073—20 90-21101

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.43-1984. 6

For my parents,

Henry Edward

and

Eleanora Louise Washington Daniels,

who inspired me

Contents

Contents

Map and Tables

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

2 Pioneers

3 Optimists

4 Survivors

5 Scouts

6 Neighbors

7 Leaders

8 Cosmopolites

9 Rounders

10 Newcomers

APPENDIX The Informants

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Map and Tables

Map 1 San Francisco Circa 1855 2

Table I Growth of Population in San Francisco and Oakland, 1852-1900 13

Table 2 Assessed Valuation of San Francisco, 1860-1890 14

Table 3 U.S. Cities and Their Black Population, 1900 15

Table 4 Growth of U.S. Cities and Their Black Population, 1900-1940 18

Table 5 Origins of San Francisco’s Black Residents, 1860 and 1900 19

Table 6 Ratio of Males to Females, for Total Population and for Black Residents, San Francisco, 1860-1930 21

Table 7 U.S. and San Francisco Enumerations, by Color and by Ward, 1870 77

Table 8 Growth of Bay Area Black Population, by City, 1940-1950 165

Foreword

The land was ours before we were the land’s. So began Robert Frost’s poem read at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, and the poet went on to describe how we gave ourselves outright … To the land vaguely realizing westward. In such words, Frost alluded to the single most dominant feature of the American experience and of American character. We are a created nation and a created people, continuously renewed by a conceptually renewable frontier, yet continuously exhausted because our roots—never going very deep anywhere—fail to sustain us for long in any place. We are, thus, forced to seek the next place in order to rediscover ourselves as Americans, as new men.

The frontier, as metaphor, remains the essential and distinctive symbol in the American experience and imagination. It is a metaphor, however, which has been the stuff of myth making, sustained and reinforced by literature and popular culture. The images are both complementary and contradictory. It is sometimes, as with Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, a wilderness to be tamed, an anarchic man to be controlled and civilized. It is the forest wilderness of James Fenimore Cooper, where man’s innate nobility survives free from the corruption of civilized artifice. And, as Frederick Jackson Turner would have it, it is the crucible for the shaping of American character and democratic institutions.

Whatever the contradictions, there is a common thread running through it all: the American experience is one of renewal. The person, in nature, brought into touch with his innate being, is reborn. Society, forced to reconstitute itself, is improved in the process. At each new settlement, the social compact is reenacted by an aggregate of individuals rediscovering the necessity of community, making it stronger because of the deliberate choice. The myth, thus, merely articulates the American faith in possibility—in the individual, society, and nature—which has been the ground on which our chronic optimism and faith in progress has rested.

Like all myths, however, this one has more to do with faith and our will to believe than it does with actual experience. The myth would have us always think of the frontier as rural and natural; those who peopled the frontier as remarkably Anglo-Saxon or northern European. Aside from Mexicans and Indians, who in the myth are merely part of the wilderness to be overcome and tamed, the rest were Yankees or southern whites with an occasional Swede or Irishman for comic relief. Reality was something altogether different. The West’s urbanizing was almost simultaneous with its settlement, and it was everywhere more heterogeneous than we have imagined. Certainly, blacks have been part of the pioneering force developing America from the seventeenth-century colonies to the Indian Wars at the end of the nineteenth century. Professor Douglas Daniels, in this remarkable study of blacks in San Francisco, breaks ground in two ways: He brings to our consideration the city as part of the frontier experience, and he obliges us to pay attention to race as an element of new community formation. We are made to ask how renewing the experience really was; especially for blacks.

When I read Professor Daniels’s work and pondered these questions, two different ironies pressed themselves on me. The first came from the observation of how quickly something new becomes something old. And the second had to do with the paradox which, until the mid-twentieth century, perplexed Afro-Americans: to become part of the mainstream one would minimize racial identity, submerge difference, become invisible; but to gain the power and political leverage to demand fair treatment and respect, one needed conspicuous numbers and racial identity. Pioneer Urbanites brings these to mind with great intensity.

Thinking about the first of these questions, I recalled some mental ramblings of mine from a year I spent in Berkeley. I lived in a house, high in the Berkeley hills, which had a spectacular view of San Francisco and the entire Bay. From my window I could see from the Golden Gate, Marin County stretching north to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and beyond. And from San Francisco south, I could see the San Francisco- Oakland Bridge, the airport south of the city, and as far as San Jose when smog from industrial waste did not come too far up the Bay. Such a grand panorama, such a perspective, pressed upon me the grand human achievement of engineering, building, and design everywhere to be seen. But, then, even more compelling was the sense of breathtaking natural beauty which had been there to start with, which survived more in hints and fantasy than in actual reality.

Often, as I gazed out my window, I wanted to peel back that human skin to see what it had been once. I tried to imagine the thoughts of those first European sailors who chanced to come through the fog bank always masking the estuary, through the Golden Gate into the sun-swept, glistening bay. Were they not stunned? Were they not seduced by the land, realizing itself forever eastward? Did it not come to mind that this was a new Eden, a new chance to start the human story all over again? That, too, is part of the American myth, and we have at each new landfall dreamed the dream again.

When San Francisco was settled by Yankees and southerners, black and white, it quickly became old. Professor Daniels’s discussion of changing race relations makes that clear. In the early days circumstances would not allow the old, Eastern ways to persist. Blacks were not equal with whites, some indeed were slaves, but frontier necessity did not permit the luxury of applied racism. There was more freedom and more opportunity, and men tended to succeed in terms of their character and ability. Even black men and women were making it. It was as if Frederick Jackson Turner was writing the script. If you could freeze the action, stop the story in the decade following the Civil War, you might imagine that race relations in San Francisco would take a course quite different from what it had in the East.

With development came familiar institutions—schools, churches, labor unions. The city wanted to be civilized, and that meant mimicking old practice, not venturing the new. As the pressures of necessity abated, the luxuries could be indulged, including that of presumed racial privilege. As white workers formed unions, they would assert this privilege by denying membership to blacks and Chinese, claiming a difference between white men’s work and labor for others, protecting themselves from competition thereby. Ironically, with development, the relative status of blacks in the work force fell. It was hardly a story of progress.

San Francisco wanted to be a city like familiar Eastern cities, except for being new. As in the western movie, everyone knew what the signs of success were. Anarchic tendencies needed to be curbed; law and order would be the byword. The city had to be safe for decent white women— typified by the schoolmarm and the churchgoing matron. There needed to be an opera house where one could hear recitals of music and readings of Shakespeare. There needed to be a social register and other such distinctions of class. Above all, social etiquette had to be observed, including acceptable manners in race relations. These were as much signs of civilization as anything, and white Americans would consider themselves wild and barbarian were they lax in any particular.

So San Francisco, like all frontier settlements, from Jamestown and Plymouth to Fairbanks, Alaska, was as eager to become like the old as to become something new. In the most narrow sense, it was a rebirth—a recreation, a renewal—of what had been before. Still, it could never be quite the same as the cities and settlements from which its inhabitants had come. It was West, it was more open and more free. One had choices of lateral mobility unavailable in the East. And for blacks, since there were so few of them until the second world war, they suffered discrimination but they were never perceived as a threat by whites. It was a relatively benign and comfortable place, so whites and blacks could indulge a kind of complacency.

One is struck, in reading Pioneer Urbanites, by this ironic complacency of black residents of San Francisco before 1941. I was struck by it especially, because as a child I was one of the 4,846 blacks listed in San Francisco’s census of 1940.1 was in junior high school then, but I remember well how small a community we were, especially in relation to what we would become by the time I graduated college. I remember the black bourgeoisie of redcaps, porters, waiters, the occasional civil service employee, and the one or two professionals. How self-satisfied everyone was, despite discrimination in almost every line of employment, pervasive restrictive covenants, and powerlessness in city politics. How ambivalent everyone was about the wave of blacks from the South, brought in to man new jobs in the war industries.

Perceptions were often wrong. The old residents saw the new as crude, rough, and boisterous. They lacked the manners and sense of decorum San Francisco blacks had come to see as signs of accomplishment and good taste. Still they were often skilled and semiskilled workers, whereas the older residents had been largely servants. They made a lot of money in the shipyards and, with wartime restrictions on consumer goods, like most Americans they spent wildly on parties, and whiskey, and fun. Some saved and formed the basis of black business in the city.

The older residents, quite self-conscious of the image of blacks, were often embarrassed by them. In those days, the great teenage recreation was going to dances at Sweet’s ballroom in Oakland, where the big bands played. Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Chick Webb, Count Basie, and the others would come through town, playing two successive nights at Sweet’s. The first night was for whites and the second for blacks. I don’t know how that came about; I never saw a written rule. But whites never went on the second night, and blacks never went on the first.

The older residents of the Bay Area had been going to dances like that for years. During the war it continued, but now the Zoot Suit craze was on, and there was always some violence. There was sure to be at least one knife fight at every dance. The older residents liked to say that it was because of the newcomers, who hadn’t yet learned how to behave.

With greater numbers, blacks in San Francisco could not be ignored, so much of the ground for complacency disappeared. Racial tensions rose. Certainly not like Detroit, New York, or Los Angeles, but it was palpable. There were now incidents of police brutality, something the older residents had not remembered. There were white as well as black newcomers—most from the South—and no one seemed to know how to behave as San Franciscans. There were not a few older black residents who expressed the wish that they would all go back where they came from.

Numbers, a significant racial presence, made a difference. The character of San Francisco’s black middle class changed as the black population could support black business and professional people. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, and later teachers supplanted the redcaps and porters as a new bourgeoisie. But numbers meant potential political clout, not much realized until the 1960s. Blacks became difficult to ignore. Racial tensions rose from benign indifference to antagonistic cooperation. Few would regret it.

One event sticks in my mind as symbolic of that shift from old black San Francisco to new. During the height of the war, the San Francisco papers broke a curious story. A young man had been hired by the Municipal Railway as a streetcar motorman. He had joined and been accepted by the union, no one had identified him as an Afro-American, because he looked white. And he did not make it known until after he had been hired. It was something of a scandal. It brought public attention to what had always been known: blacks were excluded from even the most ordinary city employment. The union’s loud protest at the man’s deception exposed its own racism. White workers would not work with blacks as equals, it was said—as it had been said for over a century. White people would feel uncomfortable and refuse to ride on a streetcar driven by a Negro. The war and not the western frontier made such cliches obsolete. The man kept his job, and in a short time blacks were being generally hired on the Municipal Railway.

Douglas Daniels’s Pioneer Urbanites makes us rethink community formation in the United States. Cliches about the frontier melting pot can no longer abide. The emerging community that Daniels describes is one of multi-ethnic diversity and tension. Equally important, this is a rare study of the birth, development, and transformation of an Afro-American community.

NATHAN IRVIN HUGGINS

Preface

We have the record of kings and gentlemen ad nauseum and in stupid detail; but of the common run of human beings, and particularly of the half or wholly submerged working group, the world has saved all too little of authentic record and tried to forget or ignore even the little saved.

W. E. B. Du Bois

This work focuses on the quality of life and the urban identity of the Black residents of the San Francisco Bay Area from 1850 to World War II, mainly from the vantage point of San Francisco, the first west coast metropolis. When the East Bay municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley are considered, they are regarded primarily as organically related to the oldest city, and only secondarily as cities in their own right. This focus highlights a phase of Black city life that has been neglected because of a scholarly preoccupation with the mass migration of Black southerners and the development of the modern ghetto. While justifiable, this preoccupation ignores a pioneer period that is probably not unique to San Francisco, thereby preventing a clear understanding of the history of all Black city dwellers and of their successes before the ghetto. Study of San Francisco clarifies the import of the pioneer phase, because in that city it was long lived—from the emergence of the city in the 1850s to the development of the ghettos around World War II.

This is not the typical Black urban history, which invariably titillates the reader with the squalor of ghetto life, the carnage of the race riot, or both. The San Francisco and Oakland ghettos developed a full generation later than in the northeast; riots involving Blacks are rare and fairly recent occurrences in the Bay Area. Nor is this an examination of social mobility, social class, or working-class culture.

Until the 1940s, Black San Francisco had no large proletarian class, which in itself prevents the usual working-class emphasis. Moreover, the city’s Afro-Americans were servants, porters, chambermaids, cooks, and waiters, rarely professionals or businessmen. They developed close personal ties with the city’s leading citizens and, consequently, frequently expressed the political and economic ideas of the elite—not those of the proletariat. They considered themselves cultured, in the particular sense in which the term was used by Eurocentric nineteenth-century Americans.

But this is not a study of a Black middle class, either. I have tried to envision new ways of viewing Black citizens that do not rely on old conceptual cliches. It is a mystery to me that scholars can use a term derived from analysis of white Europeans and Americans, making it inapplicable in discussion of a people who experience race segregation and job discrimination to a degree that is unique in history. Nor is this a quantitative history, but rather a qualitative one. I am more concerned with what should be counted than with the actual enumeration. Because of its age and unusual history, San Francisco’s contingent of Afro-Americans was the largest on the Pacific slope until the turn of the last century. Oakland’s Black community also emerged early in this century, becoming numerically superior to San Francisco after the earthquake and fire of 1906. But the East Bay can still be regarded as an adjunct of the metropolis, because many East Bay residents were former San Franciscans who moved to Oakland, beginning in the 1890s, to become suburbanites and to dominate the East Bay’s social and cultural life. While there is something to be said for considering Black Oakland as an independent urban area in its own right, that is for another study.

I have analyzed the Afro-San Franciscans topically, rather than chronologically. This is in part because the pioneer urbanites remained much the same for more than five decades. Also, there is little of the rich evidence such as one finds in U.S. political and economic history that makes possible close attention to minute change. As Lawrence Levine and various Black folklore scholars indicate, the Afro-American experience remained consistent during drastic changes in the rest of the nation, for example in the jobs available to Blacks. The history of Blacks in the U.S. might be comparable to that of African and other peoples whose records do not permit chronological analyses such as scholars of this nation prefer.

It should be pointed out that after 1900, changes did occur. The pioneer urbanite became a suburbanite in the outlying neighborhoods of San Francisco or in the East Bay. He mingled with Black newcomers who foreshadowed the mass migration, but who still had more in common with the pioneer than with the contemporary ghetto dweller. After 1910, southerners, married couples, and families made up a larger proportion of the Bay Area population (Black and white), particularly in Oakland. But the more familiar changes that Harlem and Chicago’s South Side underwent did not occur in the Bay Area for another generation.

My use of ethnic terms may disturb or confuse readers. I have employed Afro-American, Negro, Black, and occasionally, colored because at various times they have all been current. Even in my short life each has passed in or out of use. I wish to draw upon this rich heritage—not because I am unaware that some designations are more acceptable in certain circles, but because I appreciate what the debate means. It is related to the search for identity that has been vital to the American, and especially the Afro- American, experience for centuries. Moreover, it is also relevant to the central theme of this work, the urban component of Black identity. My use of the different terms should remind us of the distinctive history which gave us these words.

Several diverse sources were necessary to construct a unified portrait from fragmented evidence. Neglect and fires destroyed documents of Negroes as well as many of the city’s written records. In the Appendix I present brief biographies of my informants, so the reader can view them as individuals, each with a personal history but all sharing a number of qualities in common. (Two informants did not wish to be included in the Appendix.) Hopefully this study may help in the construction of a national history which incorporates ordinary individuals, neglected social groups, and the so-called inarticulate masses, as well as elite political and business leaders.

In the course of researching and writing this book, I became indebted to scholars and institutions. Professors Gunther Barth and Lawrence Levine read and criticized each draft of the work beginning with the dissertation, and I wish to thank them for their patience and the insights they provided. Professors Nathan Huggins, Winthrop Jordan, Raymond Kent, Leon Litwack, Henry Nash Smith, and John Ralph Willis influenced my thinking on social and cultural history. Professors Lawrence B. de Graaf and Roger W. Lotchin read a version of the manuscript and suggested revisions to improve it. Dr. Donn G. Davis and Melvin Wade helped me to clarify my thoughts at the University of Texas at Austin, and so have students in several classes and members of other audiences. Tom Stoddard permitted me to read his manuscript on Black musicians in the Bay Area and gave Chapter 9 a critical reading. James de T. Abajian was most cooperative and encouraging from the very beginning, and he very generously permitted me to consult his voluminous files, which was quite an aid to me, particularly before the publication of his bibliography and guide to Afro-Americans in the west.

I also owe a special debt to the eighteen individuals who were kind enough to allow me to enter their homes and interview them for several hours. I would like to express my special gratitude to the late Ethel Terrell, the late Walter L. and Veola Gibson, Mrs. Eleanor Carroll Walkins, and the officers of the East Bay Negro Historical Society, Eugene and Ruth Lasartemay, and Royal E. Towns, in particular.

In addition, I would like to thank the staffs of the Bancroft Library, the California State Library, the California State Archives, and the California Historical Society for their cooperation. I am grateful to my typists, Debra Jene Williams and Margaret Schockley, who readily transcribed tapes, prepared the manuscript, and brought some errors to my attention. Margarita Valencia, my research assistant, gave the manuscript a close reading, detected some errors, and suggested improvements, and for this I am grateful. Michael Ames and Bill Day of Temple University Press also deserve credit for helping me to improve the work’s organization and the quality of its prose.

I conducted the research and found time to write while funded by a number of grants, including National Defense Education Act (Title IV), John Hay Whitney, and Ford Foundation fellowships. The Newberry Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center, the Dora Bonham Fund of the History Department, and the University Research Institute of the University of Texas at Austin also funded my research and provided support during the revision.

Part of Chapter I appeared in Discovery I (June 1976). A version of Chapter 5 appeared in Umoja: A Scholarly Journal of Black Studies I (1977), 2.

PIONEER URBANITES

1

Introduction

Neither words nor yet the most detailed painting can evoke a moment of vanished time so powerfully and so completely as a good photograph.

Beaumont Newhall

The writings of nineteenth-century antislavery people, humanitarians, and reformers are part of the intellectual heritage that emphasizes the ways in which society mangles Afro-Americans, turning them into drones or rebels. Black social scientists of the present day—Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, for example—and many liberal historians are heirs to this tradition. They wish to arouse the nation’s reformers by calling attention to the injustices of American racism, industrialization, and urbanization. This point of view finds expression in literature and autobiographies, as well as in scholarly works. Richard Wright, particularly in Black Boy and Native Son, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X focuses on the humiliation, degradation, and oppression of Afro-Americans in the rural south and the urban north.

Richard Wright stated the assumptions underlying this emphasis in Twelve Million Black Voices: This text assumes that those few Negroes who have lifted themselves, through personal strength, talent, or luck, above the lives of their fellow-blacks—like single fishes that leap and flash for a split second above the surface of the sea—are but fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths, against the current, silently and heavily, struggling against the waves of vicissitudes that spell a common fate.¹ The problem with this particular perspective is that it robs Blacks of those qualities which enable them to survive, despite and in defiance of the system. It reduces them to pitiable creatures, if not to things. Wright refers to them as the countless black millions, teeming black millions, legions of nameless blacks, and terrified black folk.² Like the abstractions of social scientists—dehumanization, depersonalization, tangle of pathology, disorganization—Wright’s terms show nothing if not the distance of the observers and their difficulty in regarding Afro-Americans as humans like themselves. Portraits of ghetto life—of dilapidated housing, broken families, streetcorner men, matriarchal women, and deserted children—accomplish similar objectives by depicting Afro-Americans as blues people with little chance of changing their condition.

A second tradition comes out of the slave narratives and histories written by Afro-Americans after the Civil War and in the early twentieth century. It emphasizes the heroic aspects of Black life, and the successes of the people who, like single fishes, leap out of the sea of suffering;³ it can be found in popular versions of Negro history, and in Ebony, Jet, and other contemporary sources. The authors write of unknown and unheralded Negro inventors, scientists, cowboys, soldiers, race leaders, and of proud and distinguished politicians, lawyers, teachers, and ministers. Unlike Richard Wright, these writers do not view the success tales as exceptions, but either as the rule or as representations of the potential of Black folk.

To many observers, this kind of history is a self-inflation or glorification of a few successes that overlooks the impoverished and oppressed conditions characteristic of Afro-American life. Meanwhile, the critics of the ghetto pathology school maintain that the social scientists and social workers overlook the pleasanter aspects of life and the strengths of Black folk.

I find both criticisms worthy of serious reflection. The vitality of Afro- Americans and their culture is all the more impressive when we appreciate the unceasing attempts to control, modify, and destroy Black culture and its creators. Focusing on their documents and struggles emphasizes Negroes as actors; it also permits us to consider the point of view of Afro- Americans themselves, whose thoughts and analyses are far more important than those of outsiders—census-takers, social workers, and wellmeaning reformers and scholars. The problem with the alternative, as exemplified by Richard Wright and many others, is that it sees Afro- Americans as mere reactors to vast impersonal forces—like Bigger Thomas.

These different perspectives affect policy. We know that such concerns played a greater role in motivating nineteenth-century reformers than did any consideration for the human being. Abolitionists, antislavery people, and politicians were concerned with abstractions: democracy, free soil, free labor, the union; and it was for these reasons that they denounced slavery or the south. In the twentieth century, reformers and politicians care more about the reputation of the nation as a leader of the free world than they do about the oppression of Afro-Americans, and so once again the Negro revolution or movement is a means to another end. They believe they need only to tinker with their system by passing civil rights laws or preparing Negroes for integration to make all right with their world.

Those who stress Black pride and accomplishments are rarely more critical of the system. They emphasize the importance of individual efforts, rather than questioning the basic nature of American society. While giving Afro-Americans a measure of humanity and the ability to improve their condition, they ultimately blame the citizen rather than the system for his failings. Like Booker T. Washington and today’s conservatives, they hold the victim responsible for his poverty, if not for the crimes of his oppressors.

These thoughts resulted from a look at the early urban experiences of Blacks in San Francisco. Along with other assumptions, I began research convinced that the documents of Negroes need to be consulted and given priority over government reports, census data, court testimony, and the records of bureaucrats. In addition, while I believe that written documents of the Afro-Americans should be used when available, scholars must tap the most appropriate sources, which are not always recorded on paper or even preserved in archives. Oral, musical, and photographic records are as significant in Black history as the traditional kinds of written documents. I have tried to give primary consideration to Afro-San Franciscans’ views of themselves. Politicians, proscriptive legislation, and race relations, which have all figured largely in a number of Black history works, are tangential. Only after careful consideration of Afro-American life, culture, and views can we undertake comparisons of ethnic groups and formulation of social policy.

Rather than treat the destructive impact of the city, or merely glorify the accomplishments of the pioneers, I tried to relate the pioneers’ experiences to the central theme of Black American history. The remoteness of San Francisco, and the racism of